Dave graduated from Waltham High School in 1949, bound for MIT, but he contracted polio in July of that summer. He recounted what happened next: “A DJ at WCRB, Waltham, (1330 AM daytime only then) played a song each day for those of us in the hospital ward where I recuperated, adding the invitation to visit him when we (patients in the ward) got out. Bill Sherman (who became a mentor) suggested we join the Saturday morning WCRB program for teens, ‘Young America Speaks,’ which we did, and I was hooked.”
Dave went on to attend and graduate in 1954 from Boston University and worked on the announcing staff of the college station WBUR. While attending BU full-time, Dave also stayed with WCRB.
As WCRB’s news director and as the “Voice of the Boston Pops,” Dave interviewed hundreds of notables, including Boston Mayors John B. Hynes, John Collins, Kevin White (a WCRB listener) and Ray Flynn, Governors John Volpe and Frank Sargent, US Senators Edward Brooke, Ted Kennedy, and Paul Tsongas, US Rep. the Rev. Robert Drinan, inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, US Navy Admiral Grace Hopper, Raytheon President Tom Phillips, astronaut Ron McNair (the first Black astronaut in space who died in the Challenger explosion), legendary Christian Science Monitor Editor Erwin Canham, and presidents of several colleges. He also interviewed celebrities like Charlton Heston, James Earl Jones, Lee Remick, Leonard Nimoy, Eartha Kitt, Lauren Bacall, Richard Harris, Mel Brooks, Helena Bonham Carter, Maya Angelou, photographer Ansel Adams, Larry Bird, Red Auerbach, pianists Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Pennario, and Evgeny Kissin, pianist-comedian Victor Borge, and violinists Isaac Stern, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and Midori, the great soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, conductors Andre Previn, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Simon Rattle, Kurt Masur, Marin Alsop, Sarah Caldwell, Benjamin Zander, Seiji Ozawa, John Williams, Arthur Fiedler and Keith Lockhart, and many composers.
Dave narrated three separate pieces with the Boston Pops and was given the privilege of guest conducting the Boston Pops in the famous Sousa march, “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Dave was also active in the community, supporting Camp Caravan and as a member of the Waltham Salvation Army Advisory Board for more than 40 years and on the boards of Young Audiences of Massachusetts, The Cantata Singers, as a member of the Corporation of the Community Music Center of Boston, as National Music Advisor to the Newport (classical) Music Festival in Rhode Island and as a founding trustee of The Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham where he lived for 45 years married to his wife Beverly.
